Film star Ingrid Pitt dies at 73

British actress was "first lady" of horror films; star of "Countess Dracula"

By MARGALIT FOX New York Times

Published 12:00 am, Friday, November 26, 2010

Lovely and voluptuous, the actress Ingrid Pitt was given a choice early in her film career: pornography or horror. Pitt, who had spent her childhood in a Nazi concentration camp, later scoured Europe in search of her vanished father and still later was forced to flee East Germany a step ahead of the police, chose horror. It was a genre she knew firsthand.

Pitt, long celebrated as the first lady of British horror cinema, who starred in sanguinary classics of the 1970s like "The Vampire Lovers," "Countess Dracula" and "The House That Dripped Blood," died Tuesday in London. She was 73 and had lived in London for many years.

Known for her tousled hair, pneumatic figure and sporadically sharp incisors, Pitt was most closely associated with Hammer Film Productions, the British studio famous for the lurid, the lascivious and the low-budget. The Queen of Scream, the British press called her. Hammer billed her as "the most beautiful ghoul in the world.

In fact, Pitt made only a handful of horror films, and not all for Hammer. But her striking, barely clad screen presence and vampirical Middle European accent -- it was her real accent -- secured her an international cult following that seems likely to remain undead for years to come.

More Information

She was also an enthusiastic keeper of her own flame, appearing at horror conventions and maintaining an evocative website, pittofhorror.com. So earnestly did Pitt continue to inhabit her screen persona that she was known on occasion to bite the necks of interviewers -- not enough to draw blood but enough for dramatic impact.

Pitt was born in Poland on Nov. 21, 1937. Her precise given name has been lost to time; British news articles have often rendered it as Ingoushka Petrov. Her father was German, her mother a Polish Jew, and in 1942 the Nazis picked the family up. Separated from her father and older sister, she was sent with her mother to the Stutthof concentration camp.

They were held there for three years. In interviews Pitt spoke of having seen her mother's best friend hanged and her own best friend, a little girl, raped and beaten to death by guards. She recalled lying in the straw, dreaming of being someone else.

After the war she and her mother trudged from one refugee camp to the next, searching for her father and sister. They eventually found them, but by then her father was a broken man. He lived only five years more.